LONDON — Star Trek fans made history yesterday by breaking the record for the largest gathering
of people dressed as characters from the TV series at the Destination Star Trek London
convention.

An estimated 1,083 costume-clad trekkies assembled at the event at London’s ExCel center,
beating the record of 1,040 characters, which was set at the bigger, annual Star Trek convention in
Las Vegas in August.

The achievement will be verified by Guinness World Records within a few days, but organizers
were confident that they had topped the Las Vegas record.

The majority of record-breakers dressed in the color-block uniforms of Starfleet, with Vulcans,
Klingons and Romulans peppering the crowd.

Trekkie Mark Whitfield went to an extreme effort to participate, wearing a full-body suit to
emulate a mugato, a beast from the original
Star Trek series.

“It looks silly. It’s just a gorilla suit painted white with horns on it. It’s very, very hot.
In fact, I was on the verge of collapse when a very kind person gave me a bottle of water because I
dehydrated quite badly,” he said.

Destination Star Trek London is the first live Star Trek event in Britain in more than a decade.
About 17,000 fans came to London to celebrate the 46-year-old TV and film franchise, which has
spawned six television series and 11 feature films.The three-day convention was visited by all five
captains from the TV series, who appeared onstage together for the first time.Dawn Harris, 26, who
had created an Orion slave-girl costume and painted herself metallic green, said there was great
enthusiasm for the world-record attempt.

“There just hasn’t been a convention in the U.K. for so long. So I think everyone wants to be
involved in everything as much as they can. Everybody saw that guy jump out of a plane in space, so
people are drawn to things like that,” she said, referring to Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking
jump from a balloon near the edge of space last Sunday.

“Nerds like achieving missions. We’ve been set a quest, and it must be achieved,” added Harris’
fiance, Ryan Croft.